California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1) (3 page)

Stripped, he hung the holstered derringer
within reach on one of the brass bedposts. His eyes widened. The sight of her
pale, tapered, but almost boyishly slender body, the contrastingly full breasts
and the sheathed tongue of flesh protruding faintly beneath the triangle of
soft, dark hair made him breathe deeply. Standing there in just his boots and
socks, with his penis practically touching his belly button, he felt slightly
foolish.

"Do you always wear that veil and
those damn gloves?" he asked, trying to recover his composure. "Why
don't you take the hat off, at least, so I can see your face?"

"You can see my face tomorrow."
She pulled her legs up and exposed herself a fraction more. "Tomorrow, all
the mysteries will be revealed. On the way to Promontory."

"Suit yourself." He pulled off
his boots and socks, not admitting that the gloves and the veil, in fact, all
the bizarre elements, added to his excitement, intensified his lust.

"Now..."
she said. She began to falter, almost betrayed by the waves of revulsion that
buffeted her as she watched the pulsing of his massive organ. She almost gagged
on her words. "Now...I...want...to make you feel...the way I did at
Arabella's that night. With my hands...and...my...mouth...and...
this
,"
she added, rolling back on her shoulders and spreading her legs wide on the
deep red satin, eiderdown quilt.

Solana
said
nothing, asked no questions when Esther returned to the hotel and sent her to
the adjoining room. The Wappo Indian woman's nostrils flared briefly after she
opened the door and saw Esther's hair loose on her shoulders. Esther was
certain her keen nose had picked up the scent of sex. But they had known one
another almost as long as Esther had known Mosby. By now Solana's unfaltering
loyalty would override doubt or concern about the wisdom or propriety of almost
anything Esther did.

Esther undressed, cleansed herself with
cool water from a tall china pitcher and scented tallow soap, then took her
leatherbound journal out of a suitcase and slipped into bed. She glanced at
little Todd, who was snoring faintly on the cot set up against the wall across
the room, then lay back with her hands pressing the journal against her breast.
Staring at the wood-beamed ceiling, she was repulsed by what she intended to do
tomorrow. She was disgusted with herself for enjoying it so much toward the end
with Mosby, the way she had only with Alex Todd. Even after all these years she
still harbored the faint suspicion that there had to be something intrinsically
evil about a woman who took such volcanic extremes of pleasure from
fornication—with anyone.

For a moment, remembering the contractions,
the uncontrollable writhing, and the final, almost mindless soaring as the
deliriously warm wave spread from her loins to the tips of her fingers and
toes, Esther wavered. No one so weak could possibly bring off what she planned
to do tomorrow without stumbling over her own emotions. But then Alex Todd's
face supplanted Mosby's in her thoughts, and she was jerked back to cool
objectivity. She guessed rightly that hatred as well as love could possibly
stretch a woman's mental control over her body to the point of such animalistic
response. She accepted the necessity of what she was doing, would still do, and
was reasonably certain that God would understand. And if He didn't? Well, that
was a price she would willingly pay for Alexander Todd's life.

She was unsettled, but she knew the
healing, steadying value of concentration, absorption. She knew the wavering,
the weakening of her determination would cease when she began reading the
journal. Propping herself up on the pillow nearest the oil lamp, she stared at
the pebbled brown-leather cover. Tilting the book, she touched the knotted
black ribbon that tied off and separated a small segment near the opening
pages. She felt her pulse suddenly thudding uncomfortably in her throat.
Forcing herself, she pulled the cover open. On the first page she had written:
"Events
in the Life of Elizabeth Purdy Todd, 1845—."
Luther Mosby's smudged
thumbprint marred the lower right-hand corner. The faded sworls held her
attention long enough to restore all her determination. There was only one day
in her entire life that Mosby could have touched this page. The memory of it,
as she turned the leaf and began reading the first entry, erased all doubt, all
compunction about what she was going to do.

Bent's
Fort

August 2, 1845

Six weeks to the day have passed since Alexander, my dear
husband, departed for Fort Laramie. I did not know one could love and miss
another human being so. Feeling better. Well enough to go for a stroll outside
the walls of the Fort this evening. Pray God the illness that began plaguing me
outside St. Louis has passed for good and that all will go well with me until
John Alexander is born. I know it is a boy. There! Another masculine kick! even
as I am writing this. Pray by now Alexander has secured passage to California
with one of the trains of settlers passing through Fort Laramie. I know in his
heart he did not want to leave me, and the prospect of being separated for a
year grows more intolerable each day. It is selfish of me to think so, and I must
do some disciplining to correct my weakness. It is purely a matter of plain
thinking, to be sure. Had Alexander waited with me, the opportunity to serve in
Mr. Larkin's mercantile establishment in Monterey would surely have passed to
another. Time and good fortune await no man.

Stifling hot for six days now.
No sign of
a letup. I do not know how the Cavalrymen stand it in their wool and twill
uniforms. I thought more than one of them would melt in the parade formation
today welcoming Captain John
Frémont
and his
party of mappers and explorers. A fiercer looking group of men I have never
laid eyes on, some sixty in all. With the exception of Captain
Frémont,
who looks a boy so frail and sensitive is his appearance among
his trappers and mountain men. They seem exceedingly armed, up to possessing a
brass Howitzer cannon, for a body setting out to do more than map the desert
region beyond the Rockies before passing to California and Oregon. Came upon
Mr. Kit Carson practicing with one of the new repeating rifles called Karbeens
during my stroll. He too stands apart from the rest. Moonfaced, soft in manner,
he does not bespeak his reputation for bravery or fierceness. I would not have
known that side of him unless I had seen the look in his eyes and the challenging
smile he wore after the tall, hawk-nosed man they (somewhat derisively, I
think) call "Alamo" Mosby, cut him short when he began speaking of
the possibility that California would someday — soon, he said — belong to the
United States and not Mexico. At first, I did not like at all the way Mr.
Mosby, whose first name is Luther, looked at me. The lust was so plain. I must
be understanding, however; these men know it will be many months before they
see their women again, or have the opportunity to... And I must confess it was
pleasing to know that such a striking looking man finds me, swollen as I am
with child, still attractive. How easy it is to lose grip of righteousness in
the face of temptress Vanity and the courtly manner of a Southern-born man—be
he dressed in rough-looking buckskin garments or not!

The breeze that came up while I was taking my walk has died away
again. It is as warm as noonday in Vermont, though by now the moon adds light
to the lamp glow. Strange that I do not think often of cool New England, or
Mother, or little Esther, or the school where I taught after Miss Cable died so
suddenly. That seems long ago and yet 'tis but a year or so back. When the heat
oppresses, I think of Ohio, and sitting along the riverbank under the bare willows
with Alex. His boat. The water and the evening breeze making soft sounds as we
sit pressed close together, his arm around my shoulder. Dear Lord, how I go
on...

Dreamt last night (August second, I am adding this at breakfast)
of wading through deep snow in a blizzard, lost. Surely that is Vermont! and
born of this stifling heat and dust...

Elizabeth Purdy celebrated her sixteenth
birthday gloomily on the eve of her journey from Manchester, Vermont, to
Plymouth, Ohio. It was late October, and she dreaded the thought of leaving the
rolling, flame-colored hills of New England. She had heard that nowhere else in
the United States was fall so resplendent. There would be other things she
would miss. Mountains, maple syrup, toboggan rides, the fireplace in her
mother's red clapboard farmhouse, her charges at the Crossroads Grammar School.
Most of all, her sister, Esther, who would be eleven in two more months.

It was inescapable, though. She knew
that. It seemed like only yesterday that the community had unanimously decided
that she, the oldest and most outstanding student at the school, would take
over Miss Cable's duties, even though Elizabeth still had been a half year
short of completing her course of study, when the old woman had succumbed to
influ
enza.
Then,
scarcely before she had brought the class under disciplinary control, her
father, a loving if somewhat puritanical Methodist-Episcopal minister, died of
the same illness. Before the school year ended, her mother made an extended
visit to Boston, bringing home a new husband five years younger than she.
Elizabeth took an immediate dislike to Amos Sandler. Burly, a former seaman who
limped from a harpoon wound that had forced him ashore for good, Sandler had
shown an immediate infatuation with her. As the summer dragged slowly by, it
became apparent that something drastic would have to be done before Amos
brought a scandal down on all of them. An arrangement was made with Elizabeth's
Aunt Clara in Ohio. She could live with her father's sister in exchange for
household duties.

Elizabeth's Aunt Clara, a cold, austere
woman whose husband had fled the iciness of their bed, owned a small general
store as well as the modest dairy farm her man had abandoned in his flight
westward. She expected nothing so much from Elizabeth as the labor and
obsequiousness of a servant girl, adding long hours behind the counter of the
dry-goods establishment to Elizabeth's voluminous chores around the house and
in the milking barn.

Men who worked the boats on the Ohio
River often patronized the store, but Elizabeth took little notice of them,
until the afternoon Billy Ralston and Alex Todd ambled in to buy some work
shirts and overalls. They lingered briefly, making small talk with Elizabeth
after purchasing the clothing, then left when Clara made it plain they had worn
out their welcome. A half hour later, after Elizabeth's aunt had gone on an
errand, they were back.

"We've decided," said Ralston,
as Alex Todd tried to conceal his discomfort, "that we have both fallen in
love with you on first sight." Todd involuntarily rolled his eyes in
despair. Unable to look at Elizabeth, he turned away and began absently
fingering a pair of overalls. "And it's simply a matter," Ralston
went on, "of you deciding which one of us you like best."

"I think you are mistaken," she
said, smiling.

"How is that, Miss, Miss...?"

"Purdy."

"Miss Purdy."

"I believe your friend has fallen in
love with a second pair of overalls."

They both looked at Alex Todd, and then
all three were convulsed by uncontrolled, totally disarming laughter.

For a month or so, while the river was
iced over and the two young men waited to go back to work, Elizabeth innocently
spent as much time with them as she could manage under her aunt's watchful eye
and incessant demands. They were an odd pair, Billy and Alex, both eighteen and
inseparable friends. Ralston was the pragmatist, Todd the dreamer. Billy
planned to the last detail his next move "up the ladder." Alex didn't
know what he was going to do beyond a vague urge to follow in the footsteps of
his cousin Talbott to "find his fortune" in California.

Todd was the more attractive of the two.
Elizabeth soon found his sandy-haired, ruddy good looks, his quiet, gentle
manner, and his appealing if undefined dream of moving west someday a
persuasive combination. When the opportunity came to head south for work, where
the river was free of ice, Ralston left immediately and Todd stayed behind. It
was obvious that he could not bear to part from her, and the sacrifice, combined
with the importance she placed in someone caring so much for her, unlocked a
depth of feeling she had never known existed.

In less than a month she could scarcely
remember Billy Ralston's face or voice. In the evenings, after her aunt had
gone to bed and she had made her way to the barn where Alex Todd waited, she
found it difficult to stop at kisses and long intervals of standing pressed
together in each other's arms.

He took a temporary job as a drayman
hauling lumber to Cincinnati. He was gone for a week. The night he returned,
she let him in through her window, and immediately took his hands and placed
them on her breasts as she kissed him. He asked her to marry him. Her answer
was to strip off his shirt slowly and sit him down on her bed while she took off
her own clothes.

During the hours when they were not
together, her aggressive sexuality puzzled and disquieted her. Her aunt's
silent condemnation of her "shameless" behavior—spending time alone
with a man—was simply a more severe manifestation of the way Elizabeth herself
felt about such things. But only for a time. She never considered evil anything
she and Alex did when they were together, never really gave any thought to it
at all.

In late March, after concealing her early
morning nausea from everyone, including Alex, she realized she was pregnant.
When she told him, he insisted they get married immediately. That touched
Elizabeth, made her deliriously happy, and she accepted. But it did not assuage
her concern about the ostracism she would suffer when the baby was born and it
became obvious the child had been conceived out of wedlock.

"There is a simple answer,"
Alex whispered to her, as they lay on a blanket near the riverbank. "You
can't stay here, and I want to go to California, so we'll pack up and go."

He pulled a folded envelope out of his
pocket. In it was a letter from his cousin Talbott in Monterey. It had taken
more than six months to reach him, coming around the Horn by ship and then
inland to Ohio. Talbott's employer, a man named Thomas Larkin, had agreed to
hire Alex if he could be in Monterey before January 1846. Larkin had been
appointed U.S. Consul in California, and in anticipation of "expanding
political duties," as Talbott put it, Larkin planned to turn management of
his business enterprises over to Alex's cousin at the turn of the New Year.

"I am certain," added Talbott,
"you can learn what I have in half the time and become my assistant
manager within three to six months of your arrival."

Elizabeth did not respond as Alex
expected.

"Don't you see? It's the solution to
our problem."

"But I have to stay here at least
through the fall! That was a condition of the agreement I made with Aunt
Clara."

"Your slave-driving aunt has already
sweated a year's work out of you in return for six months' room and
board!"

He bought a horse and buckboard with a
small portion of his substantial savings, and they eloped the following
Saturday night while her aunt was attending a church quilting bee. They were
married in St. Louis by an itinerant Baptist preacher, who raised his fee to
three dollars after taking note of Elizabeth's slightly swollen belly and the
thickness of Alex's money belt.

On the way to Independence, Elizabeth's
incapacitating headaches and nausea began, then intermittent light fever started
to plague her. Two weeks after they had sold the buckboard, purchased a
Conestoga wagon, and passed beyond the beginning of the Kansas Territory, it
became obvious that Elizabeth should see a doctor. Reluctantly, Alex reined his
team off the trail to Fort Laramie and headed southwest. Bent's Fort was out of
the way, but it was closer.

The regimental surgeon at Bent's
Fort,
Captain Elisha Canby, had white hair, a
handlebar moustache, and unlimited wisdom and understanding. He was sixty and a
doctor, and he had seen it all.

"Young man," Canby said after
examining Elizabeth, "your wife is having a difficult pregnancy. All I can
do is give you some advice. If I were you, I would not allow her to travel
until the baby is born."

Alex calculated time and distance for a
moment. "She should have the baby sometime in mid-autumn."

"That's what present indications
point to."

"By then it would be too late to
cross the Sierras."

"Without a doubt. It would take you
more than sixty days to reach them, even if a wagon train were traveling so
late in the year, which I seriously doubt. By then I should think the snow in
the Sierras would make passage impossible."

"That means staying here until
spring."

"Or moving on to Laramie or Fort
Hall. You could do that a month or so after the child arrives. But I don't see
the sense in it. I should think it wiser to remain here, where there is ample
room for you and accommodations are better."

"But I have a job, a very good job,
waiting for me in California! If I don't reach Monterey this year..."

"Is it all that important to you?
There will be other jobs."

"This one holds great promise for
the future."

"Then you have a difficult decision
to make."

"What do you mean?"

"It seems to me you have a choice.
Remain here with your wife, or go on alone and have your wife and child join
you next year. It's simply a matter of whether or not the job is worth it—to
both of you."

"No. I should be with her. She may
get worse. She may need me."

Elisha Canby smiled and put a fatherly
hand on Alex's shoulder. "Son, aside from moral support, there is little
you can do. I fully understand your concern, and I tell you this only so you
may have an objective, unsentimental basis upon which to make your choice.
Troublesome, vexing as it is, your wife's condition is not extremely serious.
If it follows the course I have seen many times before, it will get no worse if
she does not exert herself unduly. And the final weeks of the pregnancy will be
normal."

"But where would she live? I'm not
taken with the idea of her being alone here with a regiment of troopers."

The men have their outlets, believe me.
There are a number of officers' wives here, including mine. And

your wife would be welcome to stay with
us. In fact Mrs. Canby, who teaches the children here at the fort would relish
the company."

"I'm
much obliged to you, sir, And I thank you for your offer. But I am not disposed
to leave my wife. Even if I were, I can't see how it would sit well with
Elizabeth."

When Alex casually mentioned the
conversation to Elizabeth, she would not hear of him passing up the opportunity
in Monterey. "If it were any ordinary job, I could not bear the thought of
it. But
Alex!
Sixty dollars a month! And the chance to advance so
rapidly. I've had a feeling about it all along. About California. I believe
there will be great good fortune for us there, as there would have been had we
been among the first to settle, say, in Massachusetts. Think of what happened
for the industrious, the foresighted there. The descendants of those who seized
opportunity in the beginning are now the merchant kings of Boston!"

So it had been decided. Not without
reluctance on both their parts, not without misgivings and equivocation that
lasted a full two weeks. Elizabeth had shed so many tears during that final
fortnight she felt almost a sense of relief when Alex drove their Conestoga
over the crest of low hills to the north of the fort.